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Confusion over the extent of violence in New Orleans
I am frankly confused about the question of violence in New Orleans after the hurricane struck. In the last week we’ve seen many stories that the rapes, murders, etc. at the Superdome and Convention Center were vastly overstated. (By the way, I never mentioned those stories in my commentary on the disaster in early September, as they were always too vague.) But now FrontPage features Jared Taylor’s information on these things, which is surprising. Here’s a possible explanation off the top of my head, subject to more careful reading of the record: That the rapes, murders, the dead bodies stacked up in the Superdome and the Convention Center, were not true, but that the media pushed these stories in order to make the horrific conditions in which President Bush had supposedly abandoned the blacks of New Orleans seem worse. But that the looting, the people invading the hospitals, people firing at police and rescue workers and so on, that Taylor reports on, were by and large true, but were undereported by the MSM because it would make blacks look bad rather than making Bush look bad. However, Taylor also writes about the mayhem in the stadium and the Convention center:
Whatever order had been established soon melted away, and the stadium reverted to the jungle. Young men robbed and raped with impunity. Occasional gunshots panicked the crowd. At least one man committed suicide by sailing off a high deck and splattering onto the playing field. Bodies of the murdered, and of infants and the elderly who died of heat exhaustion began to accumulate…. [At the conventon center] Degeneracy struck almost immediately, with rapes, robbery, and murder. Terrible shrieking tore through the night, but no one could see or dared to move.But these reports, which were also in the MSM, have now, I’ve read over the last week, been shown to be incorrect. So I’m surprised that FrontPage gave Taylor’s article so much play and suggested that his facts are all true, since the rapes at least have now been brought into question, and it appears that at least some of the reports about shooting at rescue workers have also been challenged, though, of course, the general mayhem and looting is a fact.
It’s all very confusing. And I won’t have time to do further checking on this today. Email entry |